“…some magical place where a total lack of any discernible talent or intelligence or interpersonal skills had never interfered with anyone’s success”

When it finally sunk in that I’m not the next Nabokov, I got pretty depressed for a while. I started to wish that there was some magical place where a total lack of any discernible talent or intelligence or interpersonal skills had never interfered with anyone’s success.

Natalie Wynn, “Why I Quit Academia”, Contrapoints (31 August 2016) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNAAAfLi0pM]